


you terrible thing

by firstaudrina



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Femslash February 2021, Hell, Past Dorcas & Agatha & Prudence, Scars, Weird Sisters backstory, appearances by Lucifer, death ptsd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:28:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29809821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Dorcas never thought Sabrina was anything much, a goody-goody who couldn’t commit to the want in her eyes. But Sabrina is different in Hell.
Relationships: Dorcas/Sabrina Morningstar, Dorcas/Sabrina Spellman
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20
Collections: Done Reading(the Good Stuff)





	you terrible thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [clytemnestras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/gifts).



> A warning for body horror. If you’re squeamish of needles (the sewing kind), knife wounds, and rot, then know you’ll encounter them here. There is a description of Dorcas’ murder and later decomposition. It is set in Hell, so warning for the Satanic patriarchy. 
> 
> This is set post-Part 3.
> 
> If you'd like a soundtrack, check out the fanmix for this fic, [hell is other people.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2czSOoc8wmOjIonEBFIOYP/)

It does feel strangely like an orgasm.

It’s the way Dorcas swallows against her own pulse, the way her fingertips tingle, the way her muscles tense and body arches. What’s different is everything else.

“It’s me!” she insists, her voice wild and panic-sharp as the silver knife glances off her arms and the palms of her hands, blood making everything stick and slip. She forgets sense right then, forgets even magic; she’s helpless, she’s stone, and there is no one to protect her. “Aggie, it’s me!”

Agatha smiles, her eyes alight in a way Dorcas has never seen them, and says, “I know who it is,” as her full weight drives the knife home again, and again. Her lips against Dorcas’ forehead, a smiling smear of black. 

Dorcas chokes before she realizes it’s blood filling her throat, a taste like licking her fork after scraping it against an empty dinner plate; thick like syrup, she can feel it coat her teeth and refuse to go down, or come up, and she can’t breathe around it, so hot that it must be the good blood, from the heart. When they were little and couldn’t sleep, Prudence would make them bedtime potions, though she was little too; herbs ground to a paste and thinned with hot water, dense with chocolate so they wouldn’t complain. 

Dorcas thinks about that, when it happens. La grande mort, or whatever.

So hot and then suddenly frigid, salt water in her lungs and her eyes, bubbles at her nose. She bursts onto the Shores of Sorrow like a drowned thing, her hair all loose and matted with salt, her dress in bloody shreds of purple wool and white lace. She gasps until her throat catches, pulse pounding her in chest and body shaking, her insides prickling and rattling as though they’re empty or asleep.

There’s a man making a sandcastle on the beach, his linen shirt trailing off sun-warmed shoulders and his hair tumbling around his face. He stands and shields his eyes to look at her, though now that she thinks about it, there’s no sun up in the sky. Where is the light coming from?

“Welcome to Hell, little witch,” the man says, his smile easy and loose. Fabric billows appealingly over his bare chest, covers a nipple and exposes it again; her eye is drawn along the line of his hard stomach, the breeches hanging low on his hips. Dorcas can get down with this. “You’re in for a time.”

“Hope it’s a good one,” she says, and winks, though her eyelashes stick together a little. 

“For someone, surely.” His grin widens. “Perhaps not for you.”

Prudence used to put her to bed on stories of Hell and the Plutonian revelries they would have there, sipping the blood of the damned to an orchestra of screams while they danced arm-in-arm, the three of them. Her lilting voice promised that they would be held in the Dark Lord’s heart until the trumpets of the apocalypse were sounded, repaid for their service with his most sinful rewards. _You’ll be there?_ Dorcas always checked. _You promise?_

_Of course, where else would I be?_ Prudence said. _But you might have to wait a little while for me_ , because they all knew Dorcas would go first, dancing on the edge. 

Dorcas is brought before the Dark Lord in her ravaged dress, petting absently at her hair to break up the clumps and running shivering fingers under her eyes for mascara smudges. She smiles, too wide and cracking at the edges, because she wants him to think she’s pretty, and to like her. She wants to be held in the glow of his heart. The glow of someone’s. 

And he’s kind of a fox, which doesn’t hurt, even if he is Sabrina’s father. Dorcas doesn’t know why Sabrina Spellman is so lucky. Bred of the best and darkest, the claimed daughter of a High Priest, beloved of home and hearth. She had Nicky so leashed he wouldn’t even touch Dorcas anymore, plus all those pretty mortal pets and even a familiar, which Dorcas had always wanted and never been allowed. Maybe the Dark Lord will give her one now.

“You have suffered, my dear, have you not?” He extends a hand heavy with rings. Dorcas scrambles to meet it, and holds on. “A brutal end for a girl like you. A firecracker. Think what you could have done with your time; the horrors you might have wrought.”

“I made the best of it,” Dorcas says brightly, and she had: crushed mortals physically, sexually, and psychologically; wove wicked spells; danced naked under many moons. She had signed her name eagerly, the three of them together, and she had never regretted it. 

“You did,” he agrees, smiling, and Dorcas is pleased that he noticed her; that he remembered. “And now, I imagine, you want your shiny prize? Your eternity of dark pleasures?”

He cups her cheek. Dorcas bites her lip on a hesitant, hopeful grin.

“But why would I give that to you?” the Dark Lord says. “You’ll go where all the other betrayers go, she who bent her head to Lilith and Hecate, usurpers and imposters.”

Dorcas’ heart begins to pound. Can it do that here? Heat suffuses her and she realizes fresh blood is dribbling from her wounds. “I only did what the coven said,” she protests on a whine. “I only did what I was told!”

“So your belief was never true,” he says dismissively, waving a hand. “Undeserving either way.” He reclines in his golden throne, held aloft in hands more tender than his own, and finally his roving eyes return to her. He weighs something internally. “Unless.”

A deal. Dorcas can make a deal. She has before. 

She’s already nodding, but she knows what Prudence would say, so she specifies, “If I do it, whatever it is, you’ll keep me safe — me _and_ Prudence and Agatha, when they arrive? Us three?”

He studies her. “I can come to an agreement,” he allows.

She promises anything.

“Alright,” the Dark Lord says, pleased again, and leans forward. “My daughter, you see, has recently ascended.”

Orphans are common among witches, though they’re not all orphans, strictly speaking. A laissez-faire attitude towards sex tends to result in more than a few unexpected surprises that have resisted the right herbs and left people with children from affairs, rituals, Lupercalian revelries. Children who foiled plans, revealed secrets, did not manage to keep lost lovers, and could not carry on names. These children could be discarded at the nearest Academy for another to rear, or else left with fairies in exchange for favors. 

Dorcas was a Lupercal baby. She knows because she was born thirteen months to the day after Lupercalia and her witch-mark is shaped like a fig. She doesn’t know who her mother was, or her father, but she liked to imagine the heady race through the trees, the sudden pouncing. 

She used to wish she had been left with the fairies until Prudence chose her, and then Agatha chose them, and Dorcas never wanted to be anywhere else. 

Dorcas’ dress, in all its shreds, is stripped and discarded; her ruined tights, too, and the little pointed boots that they’d often set at the foot of their beds beside their trunks, three gleaming pairs. She almost protests, please, please can she just keep them, can’t she have them, please. It’s a keener loss than death somehow, and almost more shocking, those boots turning a corner away from her in someone else’s hands. It’s not logical. They’re boots.

Demonesses help her descend into hot springs where she’s scrubbed with charcoal soap that stings her wounds and makes her skin squeaky clean. Her hair slithers smooth and wet down the back of her neck. Once she’s out, her many wounds are stitched with golden thread, the group of women huddled around her with their needles working, drawing flesh together with busy clawed hands. Dorcas feels every puncture, how many it takes for all the ragged rips that have been made in her body, and eventually has to stop counting. _Forget,_ she thinks, her throat thick, her eyes focused on the stony wall in front of her. _Forget, forget_.

When they step away, Dorcas finds herself whole but altered, thread melted into her skin to create a tracery of broken places, like a shattered vase carefully glued back together. She touches one thin gold scar, following it over her stomach and up her ribs. The gold is so warm against skin that has become so cold, pulsing with its own life separate from her. 

They dry her hair and wrap a thin red braid around the crown of her head, the rest left loose and curling. They dress her in a gown that laces, like a princess, and paint her lips the color of bruised plums. They take her to the queen.

To Sabrina.

In her room, Sabrina presides over a carved desk cluttered with pens and books and scrolls, hairbrushes and lipstick tubes, a bottle of bright red nail polish. She’s pouring over some papers, her fingers pressed so hard against her temple that when she lifts her head, there’s a small red imprint in the spot. 

Dorcas grins.

“Hiya, Spellman,” she says, and watches Sabrina’s eyes widen.

“You have _got_ to be kidding me.” Sabrina paces, her skirt swishing around her legs until she wrenches it out of her way impatiently, turns and starts the track again. “I have enough handmaidens! Aren’t you supposed to be — wherever witches go when they die?”

“Real compassionate, half-breed.” Dorcas has thrown herself onto Sabrina’s red silk coverlet, turning her cold cheek against its slippery chill. It already feels like home. “I’m your present. Aren’t you happy to see a familiar face? Daddy thought you would be. You know, if I knew how hot he was in person, I’d have stuck it out as a disciple. Really hard to get it up for horns and hooves. I mean, you’d know — killed the buzz with Nick, didn’t it?”

Sabrina freezes in place, eyes dark and furious, and Dorcas gives her a proper once-over for the first time. Her red velvet gown brushes the floor, her skin all pearl, and she looks like a slice of cake, an after-dinner treat; there’s ink on her cheek and her headband is gone, replaced with a circlet of velvet flowers that trail ribbons down the nape of her neck. 

“Say his name again,” Sabrina tells her, dangerous like she gets sometimes, “And I won’t even show you the mercy of throwing you to the horde. Remember what I did to Agatha? That’ll be nothing compared to what I do to you. How’d you like to vomit up hellfire?” 

Excitement sparks at the base of Dorcas’ skull and zips down her spine, a fuse lit and heat unfurling. She sits up, her palm flat against her stomach but feeling only the boning of her corset. She didn’t realize she could — that there was anything inside her anymore. “You sure like the way that crown fits, don’t you, Spellman?”

Sabrina studies her, then says, “It’s Morningstar now, actually.” Her hand flicks out dismissively as she returns to her work. “But I think ‘your majesty’ should suffice.”

Dorcas’ lips part until they rediscover the shape of her smile. “You betcha, babe.”

Sabrina throws a hard glance over her shoulder, and Dorcas resolves to do what she has always done — taste every sweet thing she could touch.

Sabrina’s different in Hell.

What was implied is now explicit in the lift of her chin, her tiny twisting smirk. No longer does she feel the tyranny of plaid skirts and sweater sets; there are no loving hands to hold her back. She perches on her throne with the Dark Lord himself left standing and hears petitions from every soul in Hell, even after boredom has long drooped the eyelids of everyone else on the dais. Dorcas drowses until her chin slips off her hand and Sabrina is still going, making ringing pronouncements and shredding the egos of the Kings of Hell, demons who crawled the subterranean realm for eons before she was even a twinkle in the Devil’s eye. To the manor born.

“Daughter,” Lucifer sighs, exhausted, “If we could take a sojourn to the Pit for some light flaying —”

“I’m good,” Sabrina says, then to the soul writhing in torment before her, “You were saying?”

Dorcas smirks until she catches the Dark Lord looking, then quickly hides it behind a yawn.

Not different, then, but darkly blooming, like the flowers they would pick under the full moon for brewing. Petals closed tight against a burning sun but unpeeling in the dark, bright as stars. Epiphyllum oxypetalum. Dorcas loops the letters on the inside of her wrist with a fingertip, remembering Prudence leaning over with indigo ink to correct her spelling. 

Dorcas never thought Sabrina was anything much, a goody-goody who couldn’t commit to the want in her eyes. No respect for the pleasure principle and too tight-laced, spoiled by a mortal upbringing. She was always arrogant, but it was a defensive haughtiness, and here —

Dorcas can see her petals. 

It’s making Dorcas kind of horny. Or it would, if she could.

At night — or whenever, time is elastic in Hell, especially when you’re dead — she lays in her bed with its brocade hangings and touches her body to remind herself that it’s hers. But it feels like something that should be in the ground, and she wonders if they buried her, if there’s a headstone with her no-one’s name on it, an orphan’s name. Somewhere dirt lays heavy on a girl who used to spin and laugh and fuck, who cast dark devotions with clever pale fingers that are now writhing with worms, her life line eaten clean through. 

Agatha never did like reading her palm.

Dorcas turns onto her stomach and wedges a hand beneath herself, bypassing the simmer of gold woven into her dead girl’s flesh, but she doesn’t feel anything. Except the split of her skin for Agatha’s knife, blood bubbling in her throat and filling her lungs. Silver and red. Her fingers pull free to knot in her bedding and she sucks in sulfurous air, thick with trapped moisture. The sound she smothers in her pillow is not a scream or a groan, but something furious and tattered, just like her. 

She feels nothing. Everything. 

Sabrina mellows in her copper tub before the fire, flowers bobbing in the water and her cotton chemise floating around the shape of her body. It slips from her shoulder and clings to her collarbone, translucent crimson on her pale skin. Her hair is wet and swept back from her face, bare and brown-eyed. Dorcas dips her fingers in and swirls them around, flicks droplets at Sabrina until she frowns and lobs wet rose petal mulch back at Dorcas. 

“Don’t you do anything here,” Dorcas asks, eyebrow a sharp and judgmental arch. “All I’ve seen you do is homework.” 

At least she finally understands why Nick was so obsessed with Sabrina. He could pop a boner for a dictionary. 

“Better than moping and annoying everyone.”

“I’m not moping, I’m mourning. You try dying and tell me how you feel about it.”

“I died once, you saw me.” That’s true; Sabrina had been riddled with arrows in the Desecrated Church and rose, silver-eyed and bloody, to wreck infernal havoc. “I walked it off.”

Dorcas snorts. She folds her arms on the edge of the tub and rests her chin atop them, letting her gaze travel; she can’t find a mark or scar on Sabrina, obscured as she is by water and wet fabric. Another thing she has that Dorcas does not. “If I were the queen of Hell…” Dorcas starts, and trails off, because what a thought. Imagine she had been anything. She never had grand ambition, like Prudence; never dreamt of being Queen of the Feast when she knew it wouldn’t be an Academy orphan, never thought of lineage or position. Only wanted her next bite.

Sabrina sits up, and the chemise conforms to the shape of her body, flush to her ribcage and chest. Floral viscera sticks to her exposed skin all the way up her neck. “If you were the queen?”

Dorcas drags her gaze up to meet Sabrina’s. Her hand sinks into the warm water up to the elbow and she touches the bend of Sabrina’s knee, its vulnerable underside. Watches her shiver but otherwise not react. “Pandemonium,” Dorcas says, and grins.

Sabrina twitches against Dorcas’ fingers. She pulls her arm free with a noisy splatter and sits back on her heels. 

“But that’s not you, is it, your _majesty_ ,” she says. “You still care about pretending to be good.”

Sabrina frowns, her dark brows drawn forcefully together. “I’m not pretending.”

Dorcas rises and gets a towel, holds it out expectantly so Sabrina is forced to her feet. She stands there petulant and dripping, looking almost like a statue; like the fabric is a part of her flesh, made and molded. A wayward nymph. Persephone. “Okay,” Dorcas says, and nothing else, because she knows that’s all she has to say. 

Dorcas has seen Sabrina shaking in her nightgown beside the hanging tree. She has seen her in her mortal cheer costume and Lupercalian cloak. She’s seen her crowned in thorns and in gold. And she sees Sabrina before the doors close on her bedroom at night. Divested of her finery, she slumps at the edge of her bed in her silk nightgown, her shoulders suddenly so small and jutting, her head hanging down between them. Holding onto herself because there’s no one else to hold onto.

On the edge, and easy to push.

“How does she bide her time?” the Devil wants to know. “Tell me everything.”

This is the deal that was struck. The Dark Lord wants his daughter close but there’s no trust lost between them; he doesn’t believe that she would give up another life for this one, not when she fought so hard to keep it once before. He wants to know about secret visits aboveground, or Spellmans sneaking into Hell for a chat. Any wistful sighing; any wicked plans.

Dorcas hasn’t seen anything.

(Except once, Sabrina had touched the pad of her finger to the tip of her tongue and traced the outline of her mirror. It gave an echoing chime, and then she watched what it showed her hungrily: her family squabbling in the kitchen, Ambrose stealing a taste of what Hilda was cooking while Zelda disappeared behind the paper. Confusion creasing Sabrina’s forehead when the Seer suddenly appeared, waving Ambrose over to look at a leather-bound tome. 

Sabrina leaned closer and tapped the glass again, moving on to the short mortal surrounded by candles, like he was having a séance; then the witch-hunter strumming his guitar; and finally Nicky underneath Prudence, her nails on his chest and a vicious smile on her lips. Prudence alive and back to misbehaving. Agatha nowhere to be seen and evidently unmourned, but not dead, because if she were dead then Dorcas would have her; but how could Prudence be having fun with Nick knowing that Dorcas was dead and Agatha gone? Unless she found that she enjoyed being untethered for the first time in her life, unless —

Dorcas snatched up a ceramic jewel-box and smashed the mirror, shards raining all over Sabrina’s stupid scrolls and beautiful things, everything she has. She jolted back and stared at Dorcas, wild, both of them.)

“She doesn’t do anything,” Dorcas says. “She signs off on treaties and reviews contracts. I’m stuck to her all day like honey, and she doesn’t even laugh.”

No nights of dancing in her lovely gowns, no liquor on her lips, no music filling the rooms, no dastardly spells, no one beautiful in her bed, no fire in her eyes. Dorcas would —

Well. Dorcas doesn’t have enough imagination to know exactly what she would do, but she would do it, _something_ , with everything she had.

“Why didn’t you have her off a witch?” Dorcas asks suddenly, daring. “You spoiled her with mortality. A witch’s daughter would beg to be taken to Hell. A witch’s daughter would know what to do. Sabrina will never be —"

“I didn’t ask for the opinion of a treacherous little witch,” the Dark Lord says. “I ask only for compliance, and even that seems beyond you.”

If that’s what he wants from Sabrina, then it’s a good thing he’ll live forever. 

“Can’t sleep?”

Sabrina is unsurprisingly awake, back against her pillows, books and papers spread all around her. Dorcas stands in the doorway, a forlorn slump against the frame. “It’s too quiet in there.”

She’s never slept by herself. She doesn’t know how.

“I thought that was a pro, not a con,” Sabrina remarks. “Can’t hear the screaming.” But she gestures indifferently, not looking up from her book. “Feel free.”

Dorcas doesn’t need to be told twice. She slips into the silk and cuddles up against Sabrina’s arm, dislodging a tome that thumps loudly when it hits the floor. 

“Well, there’s that,” Sabrina remarks, wry. “Guess I’m going to bed.” 

She sets the rest of it aside, a careful tower on her bedside table, before blowing her candle out and sinking down. They’re both silent. Prudence would sing to Dorcas when she couldn’t sleep, and sometimes Agatha would join in, a chorus inside Dorcas’ head. _My dears, don’t you know, a long time a-go, two poor little babes whose names I don’t know — were sto-len away on a bright summer’s day — and left in the woods, I’ve heard some folks say._

She hums a little to herself, until Sabrina says, “I hear you sometimes, you know. In your room. Are you —”

Dorcas shuts her eyes tight, fingers curling around Sabrina’s arm. “It’s so cold down here, don’t you think?”

It isn’t, of course. It’s Hell. It’s always hot, often humid, a choking wet heat in the air that never goes away. But Sabrina sighs, “Yeah,” and lets Dorcas cling. 

The Dark Lord decides to host a masquerade. “I know how you enjoy them,” he says to Sabrina, words warm but gaze sharp, sharper still as it shifts to Lilith. Her expression is beatific above a stomach just beginning to swell under her dress. “And sometimes a false face can help expose a far truer one.”

Sabrina offers her sunniest smile. “Gee, thanks, Dad. I can’t wait.”

“What a delightful way to celebrate the imminent arrival of your son,” Lilith says placidly.

Later, Sabrina dismisses the other handmaidens and pulls her closet wide open, revealing rows of glitter and gleam that twist in on themselves like a labyrinth. Dorcas’ eyes widen. She takes it in with outstretched fingers, brushing the edge of one pearl-studded lace sleeve. “You can be the queen of Hell tonight,” Sabrina says. Dorcas crushes the pearls in a fist.

Dorcas eats spiced pomegranate seeds and drinks sweet wine while Sabrina paints her face bone-white, rouge blended up high towards her temples. She decorates Dorcas’ cheekbones with small golden stars, makes her lips a little red heart. “Hey,” Sabrina murmurs with surprise, fingertips tracing the wet path that a tear has left down the side of Dorcas’ face. “What’s up?”

Prudence pausing every morning to run the edge of her nail along Dorcas’ eyeshadow so the sharp angle of it was perfect. Agatha winding her braids around her head, sinking in pin after pin. 

“Nothing,” Dorcas grouses. “Who’s the handmaid here? Just fix it.”

Sabrina halfheartedly rolls her eyes, but she does. She lets Dorcas’ foot rest on her thigh while she ties the ribbons that keep Dorcas’ black stockings up. She gets her into the stiff farthingale and snug stays, puts her in a black petticoat that glimmers with gold embroidery. Finally, there’s the sheer gown atop it, showing all the structure beneath like the skeleton of something beautiful, filament in a butterfly’s wing. A stiff ruff encloses Dorcas’ neck, with matching ones at the wrists. Sabrina sets the powdered wig on her head last, its towering surface inset with the tiny golden bones of birds. In the looking-glass, Dorcas finds almost nothing of herself, and Sabrina’s proud reflection behind her.

“Well, fuck me,” Dorcas says. “What are you going to wear?”

Sabrina grins.

Sabrina mirrors her in red, down to a ginger wig glinting with spiky, delicate fishbones. They don’t look enough alike to pull off a real bait-and-switch, especially since Dorcas is decidedly taller, but the court of Hell is amused by the attempt. They like to watch their queen play at being a serving girl, ready to fill Dorcas’ cup or switch out her champagne glass for another, and they ply Dorcas with false flattery that she laps up like a kitten with a saucer of milk.

“How fine you look tonight, my Queen,” guffaws one of the Kings of Hell. He trades smirks with his compatriots, and they pass her from one to the next on the hectic dance floor, Dorcas laughing with delight at each new hand that lands in hers. _Wouldn’t it be nice_ , comes one whisper in her ear, and then another later, _to have a queen warm my bed_ , all of them thinking themselves so clever with their hands flexing on her waist. 

“Better men than you have tried and failed,” Dorcas says, her smile wide and true. “Ones with bigger dicks, too.”

When a hand wanders to grab her ass, the King in question jerks away with a howl, his skin singed. Sabrina stands a few feet off, smirking, with smoking fingertips. “Mind yourself,” she says, “That’s your queen,” and for a second even Dorcas forgets, her vision doubling on a shadow of herself that she knows isn’t her at all. 

Sabrina steps in, whisking Dorcas back amongst demons, a wall of masked faces with talons and feathers protruding from their fine attire. Clinging to Sabrina’s shoulders, Dorcas marvels that she can still get so drunk, after all. “I can’t come anymore since I died,” Dorcas says, to Sabrina’s quiet, stifled laugh. “I used to think that was the best thing my body could do, and now all my nerve endings are dead.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Sabrina says dryly.

“Oh, fuck you, what do you know.” Dorcas almost wants to shake her, stupid and uptight even when nothing matters anymore. They’re in Hell. Who’s keeping track? “Didn’t you ever run wild, Spellman? With — with your mortal girl, maybe, didn’t you ever sneak out your bedroom window and make trouble together, didn’t you ever break boys’ hearts and stay out until dawn, cut your hand and let your blood mingle, burn offerings to the moon? Didn’t you ever do anything _cool_ , or did you just sit in your stupid bed and never touch yourself and never want for anything?”

“Morningstar,” Sabrina reminds her, smiling, and that’s all she says besides, “Play along.”

“Huh?” Dorcas returns, inelegantly, but it’s smothered by the sudden press of Sabrina’s red mouth against hers, tasting of bitter wine. Dorcas sways closer when Sabrina pulls away, but Sabrina pushes her back, and Dorcas blinks, seeing double. No. Seeing single; seeing Sabrina in the gold-and-black gown with the white wig. She’d switched their outfits. Bitch stole her look.

“I’ll get you after,” Sabrina promises. “Keep him busy.” And she vanishes.

Dorcas has no idea what’s going on, but when someone sidles up behind her and places his hands on her hips, murmuring in her ear, “Good evening, my lady,” she figures she might as well go with it.

It turns out to be the guy from the beach. Caliban, a Prince of Hell made from the clay of the Pit, who takes fifteen minutes to realize the girl he’s dancing with isn’t Sabrina. Dorcas manages to hang onto him for another ten, her elbow hooked around his neck so she can mumble drunkenly into his skin, as cool to the touch as she is. 

“You know,” Dorcas says, raising a pointing finger for emphasis. “This isn’t the first time she’s done this. She stole my — she stole my part in the play, I —” She taps her chest insistently. “ _I_ was gonna be Lilith, and like, a very sexy Lilith, I had the dress and the —” Gesturing vaguely, she goes on, “I was _brilliant_ and I was gonna go to town on Nick, really sell it, Prudence was so greedy when we fucked him — don’t tell her I said that — and I never got my chance alone, and then I _died_ , and now I guess I never will!”

“Ah,” Caliban says, looking around over her head. “Right. Yep.”

“You’re pretty tall,” Dorcas deduces, craning up at him. His aggrieved expression transforms into one both pleased and frustrated, so she turns to find Sabrina is back, and breathless. Not looking at him at all; looking at Dorcas.

“Hey,” Sabrina says. “Let’s run wild.”

Dorcas tips glasses of poisonous green absinthe against Sabrina’s red mouth until it turns a muddled purple. Alcohol steals over her face soft and hazy, turning her slow blinks into entire productions, dark lashes fanned over her cheeks like the fall of a curtain over a stage. “We can’t see the moon from here,” Sabrina says, peering into the bottom of her cup for a final sip, if there is one. “Want to make a blood oath?”

Her head lifts with a bright smile, face so lit up it might as well be limned with gold. She’s so beautiful that Dorcas forgets for a minute how annoying she is, how prim and patronizing. “Haven’t broken any hearts in a while,” Dorcas remarks, and off they go.

They spin each other on the dance floor in whirls of gold and red; make bold bets at the card tables; eat strange delicacies without asking what they are. “Do you still need to eat?” Sabrina wonders, nose crinkling at a morsel in her fingers that looks like fruit but bleeds real blood. Dorcas blinks in surprise; it had never occurred to her that there was a difference between wanting and needing.

They dance with demons, unusual creatures with tails and horns. In the crush, Dorcas can close her eyes and pretend she’s back at Dorian’s, feeling only bodies against her and a floor vibrating under her feet. When she opens her eyes, she sees Caliban dipping Sabrina so far back that the top of her wig brushes the stone, which Dorcas takes as her cue to insinuate herself between them and pull Sabrina away. 

They rush, half-running and more than laughing, through the stone corridors until they reach Sabrina’s room. Dorcas presses her into the wall outside the double doors and kisses Sabrina’s smiling mouth, all those skirts between them. Inside, they tear at laces and topple wigs, Dorcas’ hair spilling in a ginger torrent, Sabrina’s a shock of white against the candlelit gloam.

Petticoats and hoop skirts hit the ground and get kicked away as they stumble over the rugs, hands in each other’s hair as they make their way across the room. Lips meet in a hurried frenzy. Dorcas’ chest heaves breathlessly against the restraint of stays. It’s too bad she never got to read the last chapter of _Buxom and the Beast_ , but maybe that doesn’t matter anymore; her own bodice-ripper. 

They come apart piece by piece until they’re left in shifts and stockings. They trip into Sabrina’s room, where the walls glow faintly red like being trapped inside a giant ruby, or this infernal palace’s dark heart. The mirror is still broken; no one had fixed it. The bed is made for slipping into. But this time Sabrina pushes Dorcas against the wallpaper and folds to her knees.

She removes Dorcas’ slippers, fingertips following the embroidery up the back of her ankle. She undoes the red ribbons holding her stockings in place. Sabrina says, “I’ve never done this before,” and Dorcas grins without sympathy, so Sabrina bites the inside of her leg above the knee. 

“Can’t wait to have the virgin queen’s cherry between my teeth,” Dorcas taunts, but she’s the one feeling jittery when Sabrina looks up at her, dark eyes hard in a heart-shaped face. Dorcas lifts the hem of her chemise to the crest of her lips, fingers sliding against herself, but not wet, not anything. She likes the performance, being displayed, and if Sabrina is a forest fire, maybe Dorcas can catch some heat. 

Sabrina tilts up so her tongue can meet Dorcas’ fingers. Then she says, “What’s that?” with enough curiosity that Dorcas feels immediate, stomach-churning panic. 

“Nothing,” she grits out, but Sabrina can’t be stopped, already pushing the chemise up farther and farther, exposing all those golden scars, the patchwork of Dorcas’ body. “They fixed me. After.”

She can’t bear the sudden compassion of Sabrina’s furrowed brow. Dorcas considers gripping her hair too tight and pulling her close, or pushing her off and eating her out here on the rug. She can make it so good that Sabrina will forget to look at her. But instead she stays very still while Sabrina kisses the burn of gold beside her bellybutton. The tip of Sabrina’s tongue follows the fissures as they splinter across Dorcas’ torso, up between her breasts to the brutal one above her heart, gold smeared like paint across her chest. Dorcas sucks in a breath and Sabrina kisses her neck, light as the brush of a butterfly’s wing.

“Tell me when,” Sabrina murmurs as her fingers creep up the inside of Dorcas’ thigh.

“When what?” 

“When you feel something,” and her mouth is on Dorcas’ again.

Dorcas comes in the red silk bed, her back a fine arch and her fists knotted in the sheets. Sabrina is proud between her legs, forehead speckled with perspiration; she catches Dorcas’ gasps with messy kisses that taste familiar but different, not how Dorcas remembers. 

Sabrina’s hands burn everywhere they touch her. Restrained hellfire. They could burn right through her. 

“And here I thought you didn’t know how to have fun,” Dorcas breathes, and tingles all over at the sensation of Sabrina’s laughter against her neck.

After, in the hungover hours of not-morning and not-night, Dorcas sits up, hair tumbling over bare shoulders. “Your father wants me to spy on you.”

A heartbeat pause. “Duh,” Sabrina says, her face mashed sleepily into her pillow. “I’m not an idiot.”

Dorcas glances back at her, frowning. She feels a little stupid, personally. “You know?”

“Of course.” Sabrina’s hand snakes out to pull her down into the bed again. “It’s perfect. Someone I know, I might let my guard down.” Her fingertips trail over Dorcas’ gold-streaked skin. “Who knows what secret plots and schemes I might let you in on?”

Dorcas studies her, confused but trying not to be; thinking of their costume switch, Sabrina’s brief disappearance. “You got a lot of those?”

Sabrina grins and lifts up on one elbow to kiss her. “A few,” she teases. “Can I trust you?”

It occurs to Dorcas that she doesn’t know Sabrina Morningstar at all. She isn’t a chess piece, or a virgin to deflower, or something to eat. And there is only one thing Dorcas wants more than a good time. 

She hooks her littlest finger around Sabrina’s, their hands heavy over her heart, nails purple and red. “I’m your girl.”

Sabrina Morningstar sits on the throne of Hell like it was never meant to hold another, Dorcas to her left and Lilith to her right, the Dark Lord displaced on the dais. Uncertain as to how exactly that happened. No idea what’s coming to him.

**Author's Note:**

> There is definitely more than a bit of _The Handmaiden_ in here, and a touch of Laura Moon, too. Shout-out to _Scary Stories to Tell on the Pod_ for introducing me to “Babes in the Woods,” which I can’t stop singing.
> 
> You can follow my CAOS sideblog for updates [@chillingaudrina](http://chillingaudrina.tumblr.com/), or find me on my main blog [@firstaudrina.](https://firstaudrina.tumblr.com/)


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